


heartbeat

by LadyAllana



Series: Catching Fire [3]
Category: Super Junior
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hunger Games Setting, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:54:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23648038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyAllana/pseuds/LadyAllana
Summary: It's always a turbulent time before the games. Throughout the years they have learned to cope with it together.
Relationships: Kim Jongwoon | Yesung/Lee Hyukjae | Eunhyuk
Series: Catching Fire [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/345407
Kudos: 8





	heartbeat

**Author's Note:**

> I really wanted to continue writing YeHyuk but with all that is going on, I don't have any positive emotions left within me to write anything cheerful or even nothing downright depressing so this seemed to be a good idea to fall back on.

It’s a slow descent.

It probably doesn’t seem like that to the viewers, sneeze and two are already dead, their skulls crushed on rocks. Go to get a glass of water and the game is half done already. Did the slender girl get stuck on her rope and choke to death? Oh well. You can always watch someone choke on air the next year.

He can see each speck of dust, yellow and brown and deep shade of red the eye can’t help but register as he is getting closer and closer to the ground, rope burn like fire and blood making his grip slippy. He thinks he was screaming at the beginning but sound refuses to come out any longer after a while, after a second, after eternity.

His heart is being on his throat. If he lets go of the rope he might break his hands, unable to hold a weapon how long can he last? If he doesn’t he is but another broken child on the ground, swept away by mechanical claws. 

He wakes up. 

He thinks he was screaming but as Hyukjae has told him a thousand times already, the sound never comes out. 

Drops are falling down from his hair, an ashy blue for the district he lost, from his face, down his chin, the white undershirt soaked to the bone each night as they get closer and closer to the anniversary. 

Tears gather down his throat but he can’t open his mouth to let them out. 

The covers next to him move as his lover instinctively seeks him out in his sleep, long thin fingers meeting his hip.

He gets out to lock himself in the bathroom.

*

He wakes up alone.

It’s not that unusual, he likes to sleep in whenever he can, especially during the off-season where his personal schedules end and the games are about the start. Then, they won’t get to feel the warmth of their own bed for a while. 

They will split up to help their own tributes, so that they can learn to fight and kill each other. 

Every year they greet him with two sets of innocent eyes, open wide with fear and excitement, hearts yet beating to the rhythm of the ocean they have left behind. 

Hyukjae doesn’t remember the ocean anymore.

The doctors in the Capital say that it’s PTSD and why does it matter really, since he has chosen to stay at the Capital like many of the other winners who continued their careers on various variety shows on the screen, morning shows, and cooking shows and for the last decade almost without fail he has been an instructor on the most famous dancing shows. 

The boy wonder.

Scrawny kid from the seaside whose family couldn’t afford to buy fish to feed their children. 

The kid who put his name on the ballots thirty, forty, fifty times a year until at fifteen he got sent off to the games to become a self-proclaimed dance star. 

Each year contestants flinch away from him with disgust and watch him with their mouths open in wonder. 

It’s not only the trophy won through blood that is displayed in his living room. 

So what if he can’t swim anymore?

What if the water in the glass seems too scary to face sometimes?

Five days he spent floating, soaking, shivering.

You don’t even need to be underwater to clean yourself here.

It doesn’t matter.

Not here.

*

It’s not that unusual, not really, not after so many years that is, a child here or there would announce themselves tribute for a brother, a sister, even a lover where the districts are so poor and there is nothing to be gained from the games but the blood in your veins and the warmth of the other in your arms at night. 

Like those poor souls who are almost out of the ballot and in for a life of perfect barely manageable monotony, Yesung volunteers for his thirteen-year-old brother.

He is not afraid really, it’s just that he has never had it in himself to brave either.

He is not a champion.

Hours on end he spent singing a girl from a district he never saw to sleep, the sword cut in her middle so deep that half her organs had spilled out. For hours she cried herself to oblivion. 

It was his voice that saved him, some rich sponsor sending medical supplies so he could patch up his broken leg before it got infected, sending them only after the girl had bled out and the only voice left in the damp cave he had dragged them in was his, singing a lullaby he has sang a million times before.

He became famous for it. 

He won his games through the public support, built himself a whole career.

Singing to a dying child. 

Singing so that he didn’t have to hear her screams. 

He sings his heart out in stadiums bigger than his district these days, his voice echoed even in the poorest of the districts.

But it’s never strong enough to silence the helpless screams.

Nothing ever is.

He opens the tap to full force, the water splashing down on him in the highly technological shower they had invested in with multiple paychecks because no matter how famous you get you are still but a champion and lets the water drown it all. 

Until its only his own heartbeat and the screams.

*

They didn’t meet the year Hyukjae won his games and barely acknowledged each other the year after. He was still too traumatized, not that he isn’t now because they have accepted in the last decade that this will never ever go away, but it took a while to look to a winner from another district and see anything but a ruthless killer who murdered one of your own. It’s all he still thinks people see him as, even when he is on the stage or on ice, he is nothing but a ruthless murderer who doesn’t deserve anything he has today, least of all someone to call his own, someone to look into his soul and still love him after seeing all the decay down there.

He slowly walks towards the sound of the water coming from the bathroom, turned up to the maximum and no doubt scalding, scorching hot.

He opens the door with trembling fingers, each digit ice cold. 

If he has to close his eyes and stop breathing to step out and away from his clothes, why should that matter? He opens the door to the shower, heart beating so hard in his chest that it feels like it will burst out, coloring the walls with his nightmares.

He burrows in, hides his face on the thin but sturdy shoulders. 

Breathes in.

Lets the water fall down on him.


End file.
